This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. Pivot3 announces yet another strong quarter. NetApp and NVIDIA launch an AI architecture. Cisco announces intent to buy Duo Security. Nutanix acquires Frame. Fantom Drives launches G-Force Storage Suite. Google announces support for NVIDIA vGPUs. AMD releases new Radeon Pro software update. Teradici expands partnership with Google Cloud. Portworx partners with AWS ECS running Docker containers in production.
This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. Pivot3 announces yet another strong quarter. NetApp and NVIDIA launch an AI architecture. Cisco announces intent to buy Duo Security. Nutanix acquires Frame. Fantom Drives launches G-Force Storage Suite. Google announces support for NVIDIA vGPUs. AMD releases new Radeon Pro software update. Teradici expands partnership with Google Cloud. Portworx partners with AWS ECS running Docker containers in production.
Pivot3 Announces Yet Another Strong Quarter
Pivot3 just keeps rolling out good quarters. The company is reporting 70% growth in its second quarter for 2018. Developments include:
- Product and functionality expansion of Pivot3’s Intelligent Hybrid Cloud, allowing customers to simplify and automate the management of multiple clouds with workload mobility and disaster recovery capabilities across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
- Expansion into even more hybrid cloud multiple-workload use cases, and significant increases in IoT use cases and smart city initiatives.
- Large enterprise customers delivered 65 percent of the company’s revenue in Q2, with a 74-percent increase in average sales price in Q2 2018 over Q2 2017. The company closed its largest deal in history, and closed more $1 million deals than ever.
- More than 70-percent growth in Q2 2018 compared to Q2 2017.
- A diverse range of new customers, including Caesars Entertainment EMEA and multiple United States government, military and intelligence agencies.
- Delivery of secure, compliant infrastructure solutions that ensure high levels of data protection in part through its partnership with HyTrust, a leading cloud workload security vendor.
- Growth of the Global Channel Partner Program, with a 40-percent increase in deal registrations from the channel in Q2 2018 over Q2 2017.
- Adding new senior leaders to territories to support global growth, with Abdullah Hifzi joining as regional sales director driving Pivot3’s hybrid cloud business in Dubai, Anthony Koo joining as regional sales director in Singapore, and Prakash Prabhu joining as regional sales director in India.
NetApp & NVIDIA Launch An AI Architecture
NetApp has introduced ONTAP AI architecture powered by NVIDIA DGX supercomputers and the company’s AFF A800 AFA. Features and benefits include:
- Deploy easily. Get started faster with AI by eliminating design complexity and guesswork.
- Scale without limits. Organizations that are starting out with deep learning can begin with a 1:1 configuration and scale out as their data grows, to a 1:5 configuration and beyond.
- Operate with confidence. High-availability solution design with redundant storage and network and server connections.
Cisco Announces Intent To Buy Duo Security
Cisco continues its streak of buying up smaller companies with its announcement to acquire Duo Security. Duo Security is the leading provider of unified access security and multi-factor authentication delivered through the cloud. The acquisition will help Cisco customers to easily and securely connect to any application on any network device.
Nutanix Acquires Frame
In other acquisition news, Nutanix has acquired Mainframe2, Inc., commonly known as Frame. Frame delivers cloud-based Windows Desktop and applications. With this acquisition Nutanix will be able to deliver DaaS, from multiple clouds, to its customers. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions.
Fantom Drives Launches G-Force Storage Suite
Fantom Drives announced the launch of its G-Force 3.1 high performance external flash storage suite. Features include:
- External low profile SSD drive designed for portability
- Choice of black or silver brushed aluminum exterior for durability.
- Available capacities: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB
- Interface: USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C
- Transfer rate: Up to 560MB/s
- Format: Windows or Mac
Google Announces Support For NVIDIA vGPUs
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has added support for NVIDIA Tesla P4 GPUs. These GPUs are optimized for machine learning and HPC workloads, which are highly beneficial as more and more applications are becoming graphics-intensive. The companies state that the new P4 accelerators will provide a good balance of price/performance for remote display applications and real-time machine learning inference.
AMD Releases New Radeon Pro Software Update
AMD released its quarterly update for its Radeon Pro Software, update 18.Q3. Features include:
- Your Workstation Virtually Anywhere: Easily access the full GPU-accelerated experience of AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 or WX 9100-powered workstations from virtually anywhere with the new remote workstation IP built into AMD Radeon Pro Software when using Citrix XenDesktop 7.15.
- Manual Fan Control: Manually adjust Radeon Pro WX graphic card’s fan speed in AMD Radeon Pro Settings to optimizes airflow in thermally stressful environments, providing up to 2x the performance over default settings for demanding workloads with no impact on warranty.
- Double-Digit Performance Upgrades when compared to last year’s driver in top M&E workflows, including 53 percent faster performance in Autodesk 3ds Max and 51 percent in Autodesk Maya, and D&M workflows with 33 percent faster performance in Siemens NX.
- Rendering in the Cloud: Using AMD’s MxGPU technology and AMD Radeon Pro Software, professionals can render in the cloud with leading digital content creation and design applications such as Maxon Cinema 4D and SOLIDWORKS using virtualization and AMD Radeon ProRender.
Teradici Expands Partnership With Google Cloud
Teradici announced that its Cloud Access Software is now supported on Google Cloud and available in the Google Cloud Marketplace. Benefits include:
- Secures data: Data never leaves the cloud as the PCoIP protocol compresses and encrypts the desktop and only transfers pixels to endpoints.
- Enables migration of applications and workloads without costly rewrites: “Lift and Shift” existing applications and workloads to a centralized environment, save the cost of re-writing applications for the cloud and transform them into cloud-enabled applications.
- Enhances collaboration: Co-locate data, compute and graphics in the cloud, enabling flexible access from anywhere and improving user productivity.
- Unleashes a rich user-experience: Highly responsive user experience for GPU applications
Portworx Partners With AWS ECS Running Docker Containers In Production
Another cloud partnership is with AWS, in particular EC2, and Portworx. This new partnership enables mission critical stateful workloads to run in Docker containers with dynamic provisioning, cross-Availability Zone high availability, application consistent snapshots, auto-scaling and encryption functionality. Other benefits include:
- Multi-AZ EBS for Containers – Teams can flexibility deploy Docker containers within and across Availability Zones based on their business needs. Portworx will not only replicate each container’s volume data among ECS nodes and across Availability Zones, but also add additional EBS drives based on reaching capacity thresholds.
- Daemon Scheduling on ECS: Portworx users now have access to daemon scheduling, which allows users to automatically run a daemon task on every one of a selected set of instances in an ECS cluster. This ensures that as ECS adds new nodes, every server can consume and access Portworx storage volumes.
- Auto-scaling groups for stateful applications – Enterprises have all the benefits of auto-scaling groups (ASGs) without data loss. Portworx itself manages the dynamic creation of EBS volumes for an ASG, so if a pod is rescheduled after a host failure, the pre-existing EBS volume will be reused, reducing failover time by 300%.
- Hyperconverged compute and storage for ultra-high performance databases – Enterprises have the benefits of EC2 instance storage for ECS without data loss, so if the EC2 instance serving the database pod goes down, ECS can reschedule the pod to another host in the cluster where Portworx has placed an up-to-date replica. This ensures hyperconvergence is maintained even across reschedules.
- Application-aware snapshots – ECS administrators can define groups of volumes that constitute their application state and consistently snapshot directly via .docker. These group snapshots can be backed up to S3 or moved directly to another Amazon region in case of a disaster.
